Eventually, I made my way to the stairs and looked up at what looked like mount Everest given my current state. I lifted my leg despite the screaming and set it on the stairs, doubling the pain when I put my weight on the leg to bring the rest of my body up. Each stair was taking a grueling minute or two to climb, and even though I could hear people walking around up top, I didn’t dare call out for help.
That behavior would have me getting punished yet again.
After what felt like an hour, I finally reached the top of the stairs and hobbled my way into the kitchen. A few staff members were flitting around, working on the upcoming dinner, and they all immediately turned away from me and kept their eyes averted as I struggled to stay standing. I didn’t blame them—if my father caught them helping me, they’d be fired or worse, but I could now tack humiliation on to all of the pain I was already going through.
“Why won’t any of you help?”
Despite the stinging in my neck, I turned my head in the direction of the mousey voice that had called out from the fray. She stepped out of the closet that typically held all of the cleaning supplies with a broom in her hand, and started towards me. She was young, probably no older than 12, and had thin, shoulder-length, light brown hair, large, hazel doe eyes, and bright red, rosy cheeks. There was something distantly familiar about her, but I couldn’t quite place it, and my brain wasn’t strong enough to search at the moment.
As she stepped over to me, one of the older staff held an arm out to keep her back. “No, don’t, you’ll get in trouble.”
“I don’t care,” she replied and scuttled away and over to me. “Gianni,” she said as she reached out and pulled one of my arms around her shoulder.
“You shouldn’t,” I said. “They’re right. My father might punish you.”
“I’m not afraid of your father,Signore,” she replied, sounding wiser than her age would suggest. “Where are we going.”
As afraid as I was for this young, porcelain angel who’d appeared from nowhere, my body demanded me to let her help. “Upstairs. My bedroom.”
Though I was twice the girl’s size in every way, her weight supported me enough to move a little bit faster. To protect her as best I could, I had her take the servant’s stairs up to the second floor. It did mean that we had the entire hallway to travel down, but the girl seemed up to the task as she held me up and helped get me all the way down the second-floor hallway to where my bedroom was situated. She released me enough to open the door and then she helped me in and out of sheer exhaustion dumped me onto the couch.
“Thank you,” I groaned. “You should go before… ”
“I’ll be right back. I’m going to go get bandages.” She fluttered out of the room, leaving me rather dumbfounded. It wasn’t unusual for my father to employ such young people, especially given his disgusting habit to aim low, but thankfully this girl didn’t seem tarnished by his hands, at least not yet. She said she wasn’t afraid of him but was it because she was that brave or that stupid? “Okay,” she said as she re-entered, “where’s the worst stuff?”
She knelt in front of me and I had no idea what to do. I should scream at her or do something else to force her out of the room, but I simply couldn’t. Something drew me to her that I couldn’t explain, and if she still had enough faith in life to help someone else, I didn’t want to be the one to douse that flame.
“My legs,” I said.
The girl’s hands went to my suit pants legs and carefully started rolling them up. I hissed as the fabric that had already adhered to my wound yanked free, and the girl offered a quiet apology but continued to work. She dropped antiseptics on my legs and slowly started to clean them, and then started to bandage them. I studied her, trying to figure out where I knew her from when she suddenly looked up. Those giant eyes, those soft cheeks.
I remembered her.
She was the little girl from under the counter. The one whose mom we killed before her eyes about five years ago. My father hadn’t told me that he brought the little girl to work for our family.
What a new level of cruelty.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She blinked a couple of times at me and blushed as she looked away. “Philippa,signore.”
“You use native Italian sometimes,” I said. “That’s unexpected for someone so young.”
“My mother used to,” she replied. “I do it to remember her.”
“Your mother that my father killed?” I asked, and her head snapped up. “I’m… so sorry. Even after what my father did to you, you still take care of me.”
“You saved me,” Philippa said weakly. “It’s the least I could do.” It was interesting to me that she viewed me not killing her as saving her life, but I suppose she didn’t die because of my choice that day, so it wasn’t totally wrong. “What happened to your legs?”
“I was punished by my father,” I said.
“What did you do?” she asked.
What did I have to gain from telling the truth to the young girl in front of me? What did I have to lose? She was already staring down the barrel of my dad’s bad side for helping me. I could answer her questions if that was what she wanted. “My father sometimes likes to put me in gauntlet type situations. He put me in a room and told me that, no matter who walked through the door next, I should beat them black and blue. The next person who walked through was my younger brother Marcello. My father has punished me for hurting my siblings and punished me for disobeying his orders, so I didn’t know what to do. I opted to punch Marcello one good time to hopefully put him out without causing too much more damage, but he was stronger than I anticipated. My father walked in while we were fighting and I was punished for hurting my family.”
Philippa’s soft, slender fingers tickled as they wrapped the bandages around my leg. “Did Marcello get punished as well?”
I scoffed. “No. Marcello and Romeo, they aren’t punished the way I am. They’re… special.”
